“Traffic” leaps into growing gorges between profit and principle and, from enforcement’s perspective, questions the sanity of ramming heads into walls built of cocaine bricks.

Cheadle and Guzman’s cop jive masks uncertainty at guarding a front line shifting from due process into chaotic bloodletting (invoked in a wrenchingly suspenseful parking-lot scene).

And Douglas soulfully expresses how his circumstances’ futility and hypocrisy erode him — a father with failings spun into resume footnotes and a politician whose numbed climactic rhetoric inverts Douglas’s confident “American President” monologue.